Sunday, 4 April 2010

Anyone who owned a home computer in the 80's would have been intimately familiar with the character set. Although it was possible to redefine the font, it had to be loaded from cassette and was restricted to an 8×8 pixel grid. Love it or hate it, you were stuck with it.

Fortunately for anyone who misses their 8-bit computer a selection of classic fonts are available online. Here are a few of my favourites:

The C64's font was deliberately chunky so it was legible on early blurry NTSC displays. The spectrum was PAL-oriented and didn't have to make such concessions. A popular trick on the C64 was to remap the character page, allowing user-defined character sets. There's a gallery of a couple of hundred of them here: